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Forty years ago today three astronauts in Apollo 11 blasted off towards the moon and hundreds of millions of people watched the mission via grainy footage on television.

What many people don't know is that the astronauts sent back much better images that were recorded by engineers on Earth - but NASA has lost those original tapes.

Today it has been revealed that the Parkes Observatory in Australia also recorded a version of that much clearer vision, but as chance would have it, they've been mislaid as well.

Four days after Apollo 11 blasted towards the moon, about 600 million people watched the grainy black and white TV images of Neil Armstrong's first step on the moon.

In the 1970s and 80s NASA had a shortage of the tapes. It erased about 200,000 of them and reused them. The Apollo 11 footage is thought to have been wiped out.

But NASA has now managed to restore television video copies of what Apollo 11 beamed back to Earth and now, for the first time, it has been revealed that Australia may have recorded a second set of the original broadcast.

Australian recording

"During our search our friends in Australia saw some photographs at Parkes, Australia of a recorder of the type that I used to record converted video," he says.

"But we didn't have converted video parts so we started talking amongst ourselves about why are these recorders there."

Mr Nafzger says the search team found another clue in a box of handwritten records. The documents said: "We are proceeding well on the modification of this VR662 machines in Parkes to record this slow scan. Eureka. Eureka. We have another source of slow scan for most of this mission that was recorded in Parkes, Australia."

Mr Nafzger says he did not know anything about anybody in Parkes trying to make a recording of the moon walk.

"What was important was somebody actually modified a two-inch machine at one location called Parkes Australia to record these, just to see if they could do it," he says.

The records show those Australian-made tapes were sent back to the US, but no-one can find them.

"These two tapes consisting of an hour each approximately are missing," says Mr Nafzger.

"We are still open to finding those two-inch tapes. That is something that came out of the woodwork and is something that we were shocked about, but we don't know where they are."

Re-released

NASA plans to release the fully restored Apollo 11 video in a few months.

Meanwhile, astronomer in charge at the Anglo-Australian Observatory at Coonabarrabran Fred Watson says Australia's radio telescopes played a major part in making the mission a success.

"But it wasn't just Parkes, it was the Honeysuckle Creek antenna as well," he says.

"Both those two radio telescopes played a vital role in keeping the communications going. And it's all really about longitude because NASA's deep space stations were at Goldstone in the USA, so as the Earth turns those places basically lose sight of the moon."